Mobile App to Help you Connect to your Inner Chef

3 students from the Brandeis University in the United States has developed a mobile app to provide users with step by step recipe guidance.

“Chef’s Assistant”, conceived and created by Gerriana Cohen ’18, Demi Zhang ’19 and Fatima Hussaini ’17 during the nine-week Justice Brandeis Semester (JBS) class Voice, Web, and Mobile Apps, is a hands-free application that features 330,000 recipes with voice-activated, step-by-step instructions on how to produce them.

“We wanted this app to be simple and easy while also giving the user more inspiration to try things in the kitchen,” said Cohen, who presented the app to her peers at a presentation on Aug. 5, the course’s final day.

The app can even handle the most important instructions including a shopping list feature keeping up-to-date with simple voice commands.

“I want a recipe that doesn’t have peanuts but has carrots, curry, is vegan and contains less than 500 calories,” said Zhang as she demonstrated the product to the audience.

“Our competition doesn’t feature nutritional information of calorie counts and, most importantly, don’t have voice functions,” added Hussaini. “Our app is able to talk you through steps and keep your inventory up to date in a way that others can’t.”

In the first five weeks of course itself, students learned to build mobile apps that use voice coomands.

“I am very pleased with quality of these apps,” said professor Tim Hickey, who has taught this course for three years. “All of them are very creative, original and well designed.
“All of the students pushed far beyond what we taught them in the first five weeks. I was very impressed.”